I don't do anything at scale. I don't have to scale. My core competency is as a library or tool builder, and often my primary deliverable is a tool or library.
In the past year I got a new JR engineer on my team who was all hot and bothered with docker and k8s and he spent a month changing out CI process to be docker based. It went from a 20 line shell script to a pile of garbage.
I disagreed with the decision at the time, and while a subject matter expert I'm not the team lead so I couldn't say no stop that's bad.
While I'm sure k8s solves problems for Google I'm not google. My company isn't google, and my team isn't solving that class of problems so docker is useless crap for me.
The person is no longer on the team. They left their docker mark, and ran off to dockerify some other project leaving a team with no container expertise and a CI pipeline that is hacks around docker bugs.
The existence of right tools for the job implies the existence of wrong tools for the job. The engineer in GP's story used the wrong tool for the job. That is a people problem. Had he used the right tool for the job, the problem would not have existed. GP wrote their CI stuff in shell to solve a tech problem, not a people problem.
VM/370 came out 49 years ago. So assuming you did a master's at university (I guess math at the time) I'd say you are definite retired by now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)
(yes this is tongue in cheek sort of since you said average but you also said 'enterprise' which my cheek reads as large company :))
What I'm playing off of is that the poster probably meant when VMware and such took off in the enterprise. As one would see in my post history I know about what came before and that these things are not new in fact. And in many many cases still in use today which is your second point. What started 49 years ago is still in use on the IBM z series and all of that stuff has awesome backwards compatibility. My dad started his career with 360 assembler (as can also be seen in my post history).
So I guess it's ageism in the direction of _young_ people. I hope it's them down voting. Otherwise it's misjudging peoples sense of humour ;)
This isn't some ageist kids-these-days thing, I mean that the complexity has always existed, and it's always abstracted one level higher over time. Kubernetes doesn't exist because Google and Google-adjacent engineers wanted to foist off "ooh, shiny" on the world, it exists because it solves a problem with containers at scale. Containers solve a problem with resource usage at scale, which are really just an evolution of VMs and a response to their inefficient resource usage and brittleness at scale, and even they were once seen as the new hot fancy overly-complicated thing.
For context, I entered the IT workforce just as virtual machines were being introduced into the average enterprise, and a distressingly high amount of the complaints I hear about containers and k8s were being used against VMs as well.
I'm curious to see where we go from k8s. What the next level of abstraction up will be.